French investigators cracked open the mangled black box of a German jet on Wednesday and successfully retrieved the data inside, hoping the cockpit recordings would help them unlock the mystery of what caused the plane to drop unexpectedly and smash into a rugged French Alps, killing all 150 on board.

The orange cockpit voice recorder — shown dented, twisted and scarred by the impact in new photos released by the French Air Accident Investigation Agency — is considered key to understanding why Germanwings Flight 9525 lost radio contact with air traffic controllers during a routine flight Tuesday from Barcelona to Dusseldorf before crashing.

Such cockpit recorders take audio feeds from microphones within the cockpit and records all the conversations between the pilots, air traffic controllers as well as any noises in the cockpit, such as blaring warning signals. It is generally mounted in the tail section of the aircraft, oftentimes wrapped in corrosion-resistant steel or titanium to help survive both high-speed impacts and jet fuel-powered fires, according to a 2010 article in Avionics News.

Germanwings Flight 9525, an Airbus A320 owned by Lufthansa, crashed on Tuesday in the French Alps, killing all 150 passengers on board. Footage of the crash site shows the wreckage of the plane that plunged from 38,000 feet in 8 minutes.

At a press conference Wednesday afternoon, Remi Jouty, a French investigator with the French authority responsible for investigations into accidents in civil aviation, said they had worked to analyze the data throughout the day and "managed to extract some audio data, which is usable."

"We know that it pertains to that particular flight, so that's good news, but it's still too early to be able to draw any conclusions," the investigator said.

Work, now, will be undertaken to interpret those sounds.

A photo of the bottom of the voice recorder recovered after a Germanwings plane crashed into the French Alps, released by the French Civil Aviation Safety Investigation Authority on March 25, 2015.

Image: BEA, the French Civil Aviation Safety Investigation Authority

Investigators were initially rumored to have found the flight data recorder, which captures 25 hours' worth of information on the position and condition of almost every major part in a plane. The New York Timesreported that the data recorder was severely damaged and missing its memory card, but a French investigator called that report "unfounded" later on Wednesday.

He also said he couldn't confirm French President François Hollande's statement that the data recorder's shell had been found.

The images showing the Germanwings data recorder suggests that the aircraft suffered an extreme impact when it crashed into the Alpine mountainside on Tuesday.

By comparison, this is a cockpit voice recorder from a Caribbean Airlines that crashed and split apart while landing in Guyana on Aug. 2, 2011.

Image: Cliff Owen/Associated Press

French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve told RTL radio the "black box is damaged and must be reconstituted in the coming hours in order to be useable."

Investigators were zooming in on a key time from Tuesday — 10:30 to 10:31 a.m. — said Segolene Royal, a top government minister whose portfolio includes transport. From then on, air traffic controllers were unable to make contact with the plane.

German Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere told reporters in Berlin on Wednesday that "according to the latest information, there is no hard evidence that the crash was intentionally brought about by third parties." Cazeneuve also emphasized that terrorism is considered unlikely.

The plane, operated by Germanwings, a budget subsidiary of Lufthansa, was less than an hour from landing in Duesseldorf when it unexpectedly went into a rapid eight-minute descent. The pilots sent out no distress call, France's aviation authority said.

Lufthansa CEO Carsten Spohr, himself a pilot, said he found the crash of a plane piloted by two experienced captains "inexplicable."

Investigators retrieving data from the recorder will focus first "on the human voices, the conversations" followed by the cockpit sounds, French Transport Secretary Alain Vidalies told Europe 1 radio.

Deborah Hersman, president and CEO of the National Safety Council and a former chair of the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board, said generally the voice recorder data can be downloaded in a matter of hours. She told NBC's Today show the data will offer insight into "those critical minutes and seconds leading up to the crash."

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